Featuring Kate McCoy! Kate taught an awesome class on fishtails at FLAME Festival near Atlanta, GA and we had some really cool breakthroughs in the course of it. One of which was a combo that utilized triquetra vs pendulum wherein the pendulum is performed with a fishtail pendulum. This made me think of a pendulum vs CAP, which sets you up for an interesting passing move wherein you switch which hand is holding which part of the poi.

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Part 1 of transition tools--tricks you can use to switch between other tricks! This is on pendulums and 1.5s. Pendulums work by not allowing the poi to complete a circle and because of that they switch direction whenever they reach the height of their arc. One move that makes use of this phenomenon is the 1.5 beat weave and in this video I demo both how to learn the 1.5 beat weave and how to use it to switch to other moves.

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I didn't realize until I saw Noel's video on the stall combo out of triquetra vs pendulum last week that this move was actually one of those transition spots for a hybrid family and it opened up a whole bunch of moves all at once. Here are two hybrids, a stack, an antispin flower, and Noel's cool stalling move that all overlap on that position. The more of these hybrid families get isolated, we can treat them almost like a circle of fifths to move between different hybrid groups.

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This is a move I cribbed from a recent Timmehtek that was one of those very eloquent movements that instantly made me go "why didn't I think of that?" Here are a few transitions out of it that I'm digging on. Noel published a video of his own a couple days ago that plays with some very similar moments--each of these transitions would work for any of those moves as well.

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While I was in Boulder, Alien Jon and I spent an evening playing around with some movements based around creating right angles with inspin stalls and pendulums. Here are a couple variants we played with and a couple transitions one can use to get in and out of them.

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I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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An idea from a previous blog I wanted to explore a little bit more: the pendulum stall chasers from a few tech blogs ago included a brief note on using said trick as a transition between horizontal and vertical stacking. Here I explore the transition from the horizontal stack in a little bit more detail, taking my two favorite stacks and figuring out the transitions in and out of them into this pattern.

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I've been mapping out hybrids lately that utilize a relationship between the hands and realized I'd been assuming the handle was synonymous with the hands. I then started to think about cases in which the handles could be together but not necessary have the hands together. The first hybrid I played with seemed too easy, so I started doing it with an outer forearm roll and it led both to  isolation vs extension and triquetra vs pendulum hybrids.

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Over the weekend I started messing around with a slightly different approach to triquetra vs pendulum and found it opened up some transition points I rarely use but found to be really fun to incorporate into my flow. In this case I was playing with triquetra vs pendulum with the hands in opposites same-time and looking to the transition points on either side of the pattern, which can access static vs extension or same time same direction hybrids.

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Here's another trick Ronan was showing off on the playa--based in pendulum vs CAP, he was doing a catch with the poi head that would then be used to shift the center of the pattern to either side. Another option was throwing the poi head vertically to enter static vs triquetra. I don't often play with head catching tricks, but these have a really fascinating capacity for shifting an audience's point of attention.

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